Synopses & Reviews
Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship
With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations.
In Alexanders world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girls sari, the material of a womans life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present—sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.
Aletheia (Girl in River Water) First I saw your face,The your whole body lying still Hands jutting, eyelids shut Twin nostrils flare, sheerEfflorescebce when memory cannot speak-a horde of body parts glistening.
Review
"These are poems of rich and satisfying detail-- gingko trees and water taxis, the pearly feathers of pigeons. But the real strength of this book goes far beyond detail, however lyrically rendered. These poems are a sustained elegy for homelessness, for the displacement at the heart of human life. Meena Alexander is an eloquent and ambitious poet." -- Eavan Boland
Review
"Quickly Changing River is an alluvial force of surprises reaching near and far, always beckoning us closer and closer to its urgent and magical source. From the collection's first poem to its last, 'Cosmopolitan' to 'August 14, 2004,' there's a movement here that challenges and enchants. Meena Alexander is a truth-teller who knows how to make language do anything and everything she desires." --Yusef Komunyakaa
Synopsis
Recipient of 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship
With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations.
About the Author
Meena Alexander, Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Raw Silk and Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her memoir Fault Lines was one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 1993, and her novel Nampally Road was a 1991 Voice Literary Supplement Editor's Choice.
Table of Contents
Cosmopolitan
Cold Weather Trees
Torn Grass
In Kochi by the Sea
Food for My Mother, One April Night
Pale Blouses
Lemon Tree
Three Sisters
Buddha of Bamian
Four Friends
Summertime
Pond at Giverny
Water Garden
Lavinia Writes
Monet's Trousers
Aletheia (Girl in the Water)
Plainsong
To Achilles
Veil
Three for Summer
1. Neela Marya
2. What Ayah Says
3. Dark Door
Song of the Red Earth
Quickly Changing River
Travel Time
Nomadic Tutelage
Raw Meditations on Money
1. She Speaks: A Schoolteacher from South India
2. He Speaks: A Former Slave from Southern Sudan
3. She Speaks: A Seventy-Four-Year-Old Woman to Her Daughter
Cutting Hair
Oncoming Traffic
Reading Leopardi
Hunting for Fish
House of the Red Canoe
Dog Days of Summer
Self-Portrait in a Floating Mirror
1. 75
2. 77
3. 79
Acqua Alta
Venetian Pigeons
No Ceremony
Love Song with Crickets
White Nile, Love Song
Floating on Fifth
Comfort Stop
Closing the Kama Sutra
Love in the Afternoon
1. 93
2. 95
3. 97
Old Ivory
Cadenza
Three for Winter
1. Afternoon
2. Trees
3. Sky
House of Breath
Imprint of Memory
August 14, 2004
Acknowledgments
Notes